Trump pretending that he can ‘reopen’ the economy is setting us up for more death and depression by Jason Statler

medium.com

Trump pretending that he can ‘reopen’ the economy is setting us up for more death and depression

Jason Sattler

5-6 minutes

April 13, 2020

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As usual, the most challenging game we can play while stuck inside our homes is deciding which event from the last week should disgust us more.

Is it “The stock market enjoys its best week in 45 years as we found out 16 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last three weeks”? Or is it “Republicans celebrate a new projection that shows only 60,000 Americans losing their lives over Covid-19”?

Together, these two moral atrocities are forming the predicate for the right wing to push the idea that it’s time for Donald Trump to “reopen” the economy. This premise is horrendous for numerous reasons obvious to anyone who doesn’t have a Hannity wallpaper on his PC.

But let’s focus on two.

1. Trump doesn’t get to decide to reopen anything, except specific functions of the federal government. You know he can’t really open anything because he never shut anything down. Sure, his guidance will be heeded by Republican governors. We know this because his insistence on treating Covid-19 like the Mueller investigation or the “pee tape” — and trying to use the word “hoax” and William Barr to try to somehow make it go away — led to governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis making decisions like letting spring break go on for 5 days in the middle of a pandemic. In general, governors and mayors will make the official decisions about when things reopen. And people, who generally oppose dying, will ultimately decide if it even matters if things open anyway. Things being open isn’t the pressing issue. People feeling safe is.
2. We are now barreling toward a Great Depression. The only question is whether it will be a not-so-great depression, a greater depression or the greatest depression. We’ll likely soon have the highest unemployment rate in American history. And expecting that to be fixed quickly when the Trump administration is still interested in settling old right-wing scores like killing the Postal Service, which employs 600,000 and helps keep millions more employed, isn’t just delusional. It’s the same magical thinking Trump used to propel us into this disaster.

We’ll never know how America — and the world — would have responded to Covid-19 if the most powerful man alive hadn’t spent January, February and early March recycling Chinese government propaganda about this virus. But Trump’s now well-documented failure to react to the growing threat may end up being less disastrous than the blabbering, bungling, dastardly response he’s been engaged in over the last few weeks, where his penchant for vendettas has emphasized his general lack of concern for human lives.

The “reopen” debate, which Trump sparked by suggesting that Easter would be the day we opened everything — how did that work out? — is perhaps the most dangerous thing Trump has done. It’s minimized the threat of Covid-19, which is now killing more Americans each day than were dying at the height of the Vietnam and possibly as many as 9/11 if an accurate count were possible, and set us up for what would be an even greater disaster — a failed attempt at sending Americans back into public that would yield massive casualties and wreck what’s left of our economy.

It shouldn’t be lost on us that the people who would be most likely to respond to Trump’s “reopen” orders would be his own supporters, who he is willing to sacrifice so he can get back to bragging about the stock market. And the people who will suffer the most, as always, will be the most vulnerable.

The stock market is again nurturing Trump’s delusions, even after recognizing that its convulsions were the only motivation for Trump ever pretending to take Covid-19 seriously. It’s overreacting to the Fed’s maneuvers, ignoring massive job losses and failing to understand how it’s encouraging the right to ignore what the real meaning of newer, more optimistic projections of American deaths.

“A notable shift downward in projected deaths from coronavirus is already being spun as ‘experts were wrong!!’ instead of ‘hey, the thing experts said would drive down deaths might be driving down deaths,’ Philip Bump noted.

The model itself still sees the situation through rose-colored glasses over rose-colored contacts, but it all depends on keeping up doing the extreme measures we’re pursuing (and hating) until there are few Covid-19 deaths.

We’re so far from that point in many places that it’s cruel to suggest otherwise. And Trump is willing, as always, to use cruelty to deflect blames from his failures.

So when Trump says “reopen,” what he means is “human sacrifice to aid Donald Trump’s reelection prospects.” The right may be fine with that, but that Wall Street is playing along with this game is the best argument for more financial regulation that can possibly be made.